OpenAI Codex CLI: Lightweight coding agent that runs in your terminal

Fingers crossed for this to work well! Claude Code is pretty excellent.

I’m actually legitimately surprised how good it is, since other coding agents I’ve used before have mostly been a letdown, which made me only use Claude in direct change prompting with Zed (“implement xyz here”, “rewrite this function with abc”, etc), so very hands-on.

So I’ve went into trying out Claude Code rather pessimistically, and now I’m using it all the time! Sure, it ends up costing a bunch, but it’s easy to justify $15 for a prompting session if the end result is a mostly complete PR, done much faster.

All that is to say - competition is good, fingers crossed for codex!

Claude Code has a closed license https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/blob/main/LICENSE....

There is fork named Anon Kode https://github.com/dnakov/anon-kode which can use more models and non-Anthropic ones. But the license is unclear for it.

It's interesting to see codex to be Apache License. Maybe somebody extends it to be usable with competing models.

In terms of terminal-based and open-source, I think aider is the most popular one.

yes! It's great! I like it!

But it has one downside: It's not so good on unknown big complex code bases where you don't know how it's structured. I wished they (or somebody else) would add an AI or an automation to add files dynamically or in a smart way when you don't know the codebase structure (with the expense of burning more tokens).

I'm thinking Codex (have not checked it yet), Claude Code, Anon Kode and all the AI editors/plugins doing a better job there (and potentially burning more tokens).

But that's the only downside I can think of about aider.

I was under the impression Aider did exactly what you're describing using it's repo map feature.

Not really, repo map only gives LLMs an overview of the codebase, but aider doesn't automatically bring files into the context - you have to explicitly add the files you wish for it to see in their entirety to the context. Claude Code/Codex and most other tools do this automatically, that's why they're much more autonomous.